


Speak Not and Forever Hold Your Piece

by ilikeyoshi



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Body Horror, Death, Gore, M/M, Unrequited Love/Broken Up
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-20
Updated: 2014-10-20
Packaged: 2018-02-21 22:22:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 803
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2484476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ilikeyoshi/pseuds/ilikeyoshi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last words of Piers Nivans, 26.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Speak Not and Forever Hold Your Piece

Words hung on his lips.

He had too many things to say; too many thoughts still fighting death itself. Scratching, kicking, biting, hurting. He wanted a smile and he wanted a nod. A hug, a tear, a goodbye. He wanted to say  _I’m sorry_ —not for doing it, but for what doing it would do to him. He wanted to say  _remember me_ —not as he was, but as what he’d once been to him. He wanted to say  _I love you_ —not as the confession of a long kept secret, but as the keepsake of a truth long forgone.

Words hung on his lips, and he swallowed them back.

Air burst through the seal separating ship from sea. The shuttle launched into the ocean, and even through all the noise, he still heard the wrenching cry of his own name. The name he smiled and hummed to in the morning light; the name he snarled through anger and hurt in the bottom of a bar; the name he longed to hear in the voice of a man that didn’t remember and loathed in a man’s that didn’t care.

The frothing seawater, the bursting steel plates, the speeding shuttle, the sound of his name all disappeared in a single, indefinite moment. For that moment, he was 22 again, meeting a man he’d loved in a very different way once upon a time. For that moment, he was full of hope and grit and love. For that moment, he was human. But as quickly as it’d come it was no more. Now 26, now empty, now wretched. That name spilling into the depths of the sea was no longer his, for Nivans was a badge stripped from the evil polluting his veins, and Piers was a memory in the bottom of a battered but beating heart that would never drum in his ear again.

As for him, he was the empty space in between.

A vile sound pierced through the steel and the seawater, driving the pain of nails deep into his ugly new flesh. The urge to kneel weighed down his shoulders; he didn’t comply, instead looking up into the blackness of the sea. The Haos tore through the water, pursuing the fleeting shuttle willing his captain to live. It felt as if one of the nails had burrowed all the way to his heart, and for a moment he was 22 again, burning with the light of a fire that lived to serve a legend. Pain came second— _everything_  came second, and he took one, two, three heavy steps forward. He submerged his mutant arm in the bowels of the control panel he’d used to initiate Chris’s freedom, the wretched flesh tingling and burning with the excess electricity coursing in his blood. He ripped the grotesque appendage free and plugged the hole with his left arm; the one that still resembled what he used to be.

For a moment he was 22, but then he was 26 again. Now wretched, he raised his horrid, evil arm and took aim at the distant shape of the Haos. He took a breath and steadied his racing heart, because he still remembered what being a sniper was like, and he used those skills he had when he was 22 to tear the Haos asunder. Even from his distance, he saw the monster explode into sludge and lightning, polluting the ocean as Chris’s shuttle disappeared behind the curtain of the Haos’s shattered body.

He released the air in his lungs, and invited the pain back in. And was it relentless—it must’ve been tenfold, tearing into his body like the claws of a wild animal, ripping him to shreds but leaving his heart to beat and his mind to document every agonizing moment. He was on fire, he must’ve been literally on fire—and not the kind of fire that drove him head-over-heels in love with a man he should’ve known he never could’ve had, or the kind that drove him headfirst into a bar and an ocean and a coffin.

No, this was the kind of fire that took Alpha team; that took Marco and Finn and that was eating what was left of his 22-year-old flesh. His legs gave way for his knees, and then his knees for his elbows. His last thought should have been something quiet, something simple—something like home, or resignation, or Chris Redfield’s smile on the morning of December 24th before it all went so wrong; but it was none of these. It was complicated, and excruciating, and it tore him apart until there was no one left. The darkness was blown away by flames and the pouring seawater was flushed out by screaming, and then they were not.

And the words fell to the pit of his stomach.

**Author's Note:**

> http://i-like-yoshi.tumblr.com/post/88824192220/i-wrote-a-really-sad-thing-its-a-teeny-bit
> 
> this is months old, but since i'm kind of itching to start posting fanfic on AO3 and since i still really like this, i thought it'd be a good opportunity to familiarize myself with the posting process?? wow coolio good idea yoshi. so yeah here's a thing about a ship that i still love dearly but dont write about anymore OOPS


End file.
